This invention relates to a system for disposing of infectious hospital waste such as hypodermic syringes, bottles, cans, containers, and other potentially hazardous materials and, more particularly, to a system for disintegrating and disinfecting large containers of such solid hospital waste.
Hazardous waste disposal is a very serious problem that has received substantial media attention in recent years. Many governmental jurisdictions have already enacted very strict hazardous waste disposal laws and further legislation in this area is anticipated. Hospitals and other health care facilities generate substantial amounts of potentially hazardous contaminated materials and are acutely aware of the need to process and dispose of these materials in the proper manner.
Conventional disposal procedures, however, have not proven to be fully satisfactory. For example, procedures which simply reduce the size of the contaminated materials such as cutting or compaction are inadequate because the materials remain contaminated unless they are subjected to a relatively expensive autoclaving process prior to the size reduction. Procedures resulting in incineration of the waste materials, although effective in both reducing the size of and decontaminating the materials, are not fully satisfactory because they require regular servicing and cleaning and provide some danger of toxic gas emission.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,926,379 discloses a syringe disintegrator in which syringes are both pulverized and disinfected. Such a system, however, has been shown to be noisy, unreliable, and unsuitable for use in the hospital areas where it was needed. Operation of the system also resulted in a potentially bacteria-laden exhaust from the apparatus, and the apparatus was generally incapable of accepting contaminated articles of relatively large size such as are commonly generated in a hospital environment and require effective disposal.